A Hint of the Demonic: Photography as a Dark Art

Related Books:

1.
On the cover of his When I Was a Photographer, we see a studio self-portrait of Félix Nadar in a hot air balloon. The French artist gazes into the distance like Hernán Cortés staring out over the Pacific, binoculars at the ready lest something should warrant closer inspection. He is also fully clothed. When he became the first person to capture an image from the air, he was stark naked. Low on gas, he had closed his balloon’s valve on the ascent and began lightening the load, dropping his trousers, shoes and everything else except his camera onto the ground below. Shivering as he rose to an altitude of 80 meters in his “improvised laboratory,” he produced the world’s first successful aerial photograph. (In his many previous failed attempts, the balloon’s gas valve had been open, which had contaminated the developing bath: “silver iodide [from the bath] with hydrogen sulfur, a wicked couple irrevocably condemned to never produce children.”) Nadar, it could thus be said, was a pioneer in both aerostatic and nude photography.

This triumphant, naked flight is one of the spirited accounts in When I Was a Photographer, Nadar’s 1900-book translated and introduced by Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou. Nadar’s is not one of those conventional memoirs in which the orderly progression of reminiscences serves to obscure rather than illuminate the subject. Rather, Nadar relates an assortment of vignettes, some approaching the central subject head-on, others slantwise, but all in an engagingly conversational style. Reading Nadar’s eccentric musings brought to mind Max Beerbohm’s praise for the lively, unorthodox prose of James McNeill Whistler’sThe Gentle Art of Making Enemies: “It matters not that you never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You see him and know him here.” Like Whistler’s, Nadar’s writing is revelatory in the literal sense of the word.

2.
Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, Nadar moved from his native Lyon to Paris in 1838, where as a man of letters on the make he became a fixture of the Latin Quarter’s bohemian set. The talented eccentric would eventually turn his attention from journalism to caricature, prompting one illustrator, Paul Gavarni, to exclaim: “Ah! we are done for now that Nadar has learned to draw.” Nadar was prolific, composing caricatures for such publications as Charivari and Le Journal Pour Rire and pouring his considerable energy into the “Panthéon Nadar” (1854), in which the brightest of Paris’s literary lights — nearly 300 in all — appear in a tightly-packed, snaking line. The work is a marvel of compression, the distinctive faces of the teeming cast standing out in stark relief from the collective, sinuous body of the French intelligentsia.

Nadar prepared for the Panthéon project by photographing some of his subjects, and soon his artistic focus shifted yet again, this time to photographic portraiture, which, like his comicalities, sought to capture the “moral and intellectual” nature of the subject. Though his studio was primarily a commercial outfit, Nadar could never resist a technological challenge. Apart from his foray into aerostatic photography, he experimented with artificial lighting in the catacombs and sewers beneath Paris’s streets, embarking on a katabatic “journey through this outlet of the infinite putridness of a great capital.” Nadar and his team lugged their equipment through the stygian mire and staged shots that could take up to 18 minutes of exposure. In the final minute of one such exposure, “a cloud rising from the canal came to veil our photograph — and how many imprecations, then, against the beautiful woman or the good man above us, who, without suspecting that we were there, chose that exact moment to replenish the water in their bathtub!” The ruined plate goes out with the bathwater.

Nadar’s life was full of exploits. In Sidetracks, Richard Holmes notes that Nadar and 500 Republicans attempted to liberate Poland from the Prussians in 1848. As if providing instructions for fellow caricaturists, Nadar’s fake passport read: “Age 27 years, height 1.98 meters, hair rust red, eyes protuberant, complexion bilious.” Nadar found himself resisting the Germans once again, this time during the 1870-71 siege of Paris when he oversaw the effort to transport mail over enemy lines in hot air balloons. Neither snow nor rain nor the Prussian army…Nadar’s “patriotic satisfaction” mixed with wry bemusement over his new role:

Certainly never, after passing through diverse professions in our life, never would we have imagined our latest incarnation under the aesthetic of a varnished cockaded hat and a mailman’s bag on the belly.

Still adventurous in his old age, Nadar would plunge himself, camera in hand, into an unleashed swarm of bees, trusting only the blithe assurances of a Provencal apiarist (“They are sheep, sir, real sheep!”) that he would emerge unscathed:

They have always been alluring for me, these kinds of expeditions: it seems that the adventure whistles for me… — and then once again, as my friend Banville would say, it is so much fun to get mixed up in something that does not concern you: and what’s more, well, my tempter appeared to be so sure of his business, of our business…

In that shift from his to our we can glean the essence of the photographer, who makes a life getting up in his subjects’ business, so to speak.

Nadar’s reverence for the medium and its skilled practitioners is undeniable; that for his everyday clients nonexistent. Nadar compares a colleague’s studio, a “fateful hut” perched on a Parisian rooftop, to “the Greek temple of the Odeon.” Most of the clients he mentions, however, are distinctly unheroic or comically clueless. One orders a portrait, pays, and leaves. Nadar chases him down and tells him he must actually pose. “Ah…As you wish…But I thought that this was enough…” In general, men suffer from an infatuation with their photographic appearance “pushed to the point of madness;” one spends a sleepless night fretting over a single misplaced hair in his proofs. Men might be the worst offenders, but all subjects present problems:

So good is everyone’s opinion of his or her physical qualities that the first impression of every model in front of the proofs…is almost inevitably disappointment and recoil (it goes without saying that we are talking here of perfect proofs).

In that wonderful parenthetical, Nadar counters his client’s vanity with a display of his own.

3.
Nadar’s breezy style at times belies the book’s gnomic core, in which the “astonishing and disturbing” photographic technology inspires exultation and anxiety in equal measure. (As the translators note, Nadar’s reflections on art in the age of mechanical reproduction attracted the attention of Walter Benjamin, who refers to certain passages in The Arcades Project.) Nadar believed himself to be living in “the greatest of scientific centuries,” an era in which technologies arose with dizzying speed:

Such is in fact the glorious haste of photography’s birth that the proliferation of germinating ideas seems to render incubation superfluous: the hypothesis comes out of the human brain in full armor, fully formed, and the first induction immediately becomes the finished work.

The reference to Athena’s birth from Zeus’s head resonates when Nadar describes the godlike element of photography, which

finally seems to give man the power to create, he, too, in his turn, by materializing the impalpable specter that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, without leaving even a shadow on the crystal of the mirror, or a ripple in the water in a basin.

One detects here, not for the last time, a hint of the demonic: photography as a dark art.

Nadar’s recollections begin with the initial unease brought about by photographic technology, “the contagion of…first recoil” that afflicted even “beautiful minds” such as Honoré de Balzac, Théo Gauthier, and Gérard de Nerval. Balzac, for instance, subscribed to the theory that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body.” Each “Daguerreian operation” would thus seize one of these spectral layers until a body could waste down to nothing. The ever-playful Nadar seizes on this theory to needle his friend about his weight — “Balzac had only to gain from his loss, since his abdominal abundances, and others, permitted him to squander his “specters” without counting.” (The playground taunt would go something like, Yo Mama is so fat, I could Daguerreotype her all day and she still wouldn’t disappear!)

From Balzac’s “terror before the Daguerreotype,” Nadar moves on to the demonic perceptions of photography:

This mystery smelled devilishly like a spell and reeked of heresy: the celestial rotisserie had been heated up for less. Everything that unhinges the mind was gathered together there: hydroscopy, bewitchment, conjuration, apparitions. Night, so dear to every thaumaturge, reigned supreme in the gloomy recesses of the darkroom, making it the ideal home for the Prince of Darkness. It would not have taken much to transform our filters into philters.

The passage is tongue-in-cheek, but Nadar repeatedly flirts with occult rhetoric to describe his art. Take, for example, his attempts at underground photography, described in the language of esoteric exploration:

The subterranean world was opening up an infinite field of operations no less interesting than the telluric surface. We were going to penetrate, to reveal the mysteries of the deepest, the most secret caverns.

When Nadar leaves the subterranean world and takes to the skies, his initial inability to capture a clear image makes him feel “as if under a cast spell,” unable to “get out of these opaque, fuliginous plates, from this night that pursues me.”

Generally lighthearted though he is, Nadar is haunted by sinister faces and spectral gazes. One chapter involves Nadar’s mysterious entanglement with a mountebank named Mauclerc, one of whose cons involves long-distance portraiture (i.e., a camera in Paris produces an image of a subject in Toulouse.) Years later, Nadar is visited by a young man claiming to have performed the same feat, at which point the has an eerie vision of Mauclerc and his “hideous smile:”

..the features of my noble Hérald [a friend] and the honest face of the young worker were merging, blending into a kind of Mephistophelian mask from which appeared a disquieting figure that I had never seen before but recognized immediately: Mauclerc, deceitful Mauclerc…mockingly handing me his electric image…

Long-distance photography at last! By conjuring the face of his distant tormentor out of thin air, Nadar’s feverish imagination has performed the impossible feat promised by the conmen.

In another vignette, Nadar receives a “funeral call” to photograph a recently deceased man. “Surely, this man had been loved…” begins a chapter that will end with an expression of “hatred and contempt.” As Nadar delivers the print to the deceased’s wife and mother-in-law, whose “hellish gaze bore into [him] relentlessly,” he is compelled to admit that he has already given out a print to another mourner: the man’s mistress. Here Nadar witnesses the perils of reproduction. The copy is just one of a (potentially) infinite series, but its circulation destroys the wife’s own image of her husband. She collapses, and Nadar, crushed to have “unwillingly caused so much pain,” is forever after haunted by yet another specter troubling the photographer’s regard:

How many, many times have I found her unexpectedly, at a street corner, at another, everywhere, suddenly focused upon me, an always living reminder of that atrocious hour — motionless and piercing me with her ashen eyes — which I still see…

The most dramatic display of photography’s dark side comes in a chapter entitled “Homicidal Photography.” There Nadar recounts the sensational case of a pharmacist, his bored wife, and a scheming assistant who cuckolds the former, jilts the latter, and robs both. Nadar traces the characters of this “insipid epic of little people” as they develops with the “fateful monumentality and progression of a Shakespeare drama…” Once the wife confesses her adultery, the pharmacist enlists her and his brother to lure the assistant to a remote location, stab him to death, drop his corpse from a bridge, and return to Paris. According to Nadar, a sure acquittal, a simple case of “adultery committed, adultery avenged.” Until, that is, a journalist photographs the decomposing body. Nadar describes this body in vivid detail, but prose is prose, no matter how sickening. Photography exposes the full horror of the “drowned man in total putrefaction, so abominably fashioned that the humor form soon becomes illegible.”

The drama, “monstrous…and sensational in its staging,” riles up the public such that only one outcome is possible: “It is the photograph that has just pronounced THE SENTENCE — the sentence without appeal: “DEATH!” Nadar personifies photography as an avenging angel who, through the accursed image, makes her terrible will known. “But PHOTOGRAPHY wanted it this way this time, ” Nadar concludes, stoically accepting the whims of the capricious demiurge to whom he is, or was, in thrall.

4.
The passages I have selected attest to Nadar’s peculiar temperament, his buoyant lugubriousness. Nadar threw himself into his art with the same abandon with which he followed the apiarist into the beehive:

We find ourselves enveloped, obscured, blinded, lost in the midst of these myriads of sword-bearers, titillated everywhere…by these moving effervescences — an immersion into a universal touch.

This tableau is emblematic of Nadar, an artist forever immersing himself — in a swarm of bees, in the “thickest part of a cloud,” in the Piranesian sewers of Paris, in the mysteries of photography, in darkness and in light.

Mike Scalise begins his illness memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, by reflecting on the art of storytelling: “Telling a good catastrophe anecdote,” he writes, “means becoming a maestro of sympathy. People’s reactions to these kinds of stories usually involve some defense mechanism…As the teller of the anecdote…this is the wrong place to be.” Because the storyteller wants to avoid, above all else, appearing pitiable, he must find different ways to engage the listener. “The trick to keeping them engaged,” Scalise explains, “is to focus on the oddities and ironies that would seem incredible and ridiculous in any context, not just that of your disaster.”
Putting his cards on the table from the start, Scalise not only challenges us to judge his book according to his own criteria, but asks us to consider the conventions of the genre he is writing in and what purpose -- both positive and negative -- these serve. As Scalise realizes, it is almost impossible to write a contemporary illness memoir, a genre whose arc of sickness-to-health has been exhaustively traced in hundreds of books, without this kind of reflexivity. As such, he keeps these meta musings going throughout the narrative, questioning the way in which he tells his own story and why.
The first thing to note is that Scalise lives up wholly to his own criteria. In relating the story of his pituitary tumor -- which stimulates an excessive degree of growth hormone and then bursts, leaving him unable to produce any -- Scalise takes on a gently self-mocking tone coupled with a penchant for relating humorous incidents. His reaction to the possibility of part of his buttocks being inserted into his brain (“Take it from my ass. I want my ass in my head.”) or his dry telling of a disastrous interview he conducted with a rock singer are exactly the type of “oddities and ironies” that make his book both so engaging and free of the self-pitying tone he advised tellers of catastrophe anecdotes to avoid.
But beyond simply providing a rubric for how to read his novel, Scalise is obsessed with narrative. Part of the arc he traces in his book is the shift in the way he tells his story to the many curious people he meets. He first develops a taste for this kind of self-revelation when, after a high school swimming accident, a false rumor spreads that he has died. Because he is, in fact, very much alive, it seems to his classmates that he has come back from the dead and he is called on frequently to speak about his accident, an experience he comes to greatly enjoy. “I was just a conduit for an accident narrative,” he writes, “and filled a need for redemption that many in my high school longed to experience. What surprised me was how electric it felt to be that conduit.”
With that revelation, he is off and running and so, when he comes down with the pituitary tumor, he revels in his ability to one-up anyone else’s conversation with his own narrative. At a party shortly after his diagnosis, for example, he responds to a woman’s question about what he does by saying, “I walk into Brooklyn emergency rooms with super crazy brain tumors that explode in my head” before hijacking the party with his story. In this, he aligns himself with many other writers of illness narratives who understand that, although their disease may be horrible, it also confers a sense of uniqueness and individuality on the sufferer, at least temporarily.
In Lucy Grealy’s 1994 memoir Autobiography of a Face, the narrator comes down with a tumor in her jaw at the age of 9 which causes half of her face to become collapsed; leaving her with a striking facial difference for which her schoolmates mock her. Although the whole experience is traumatic for Lucy, she comes to take a defiant pride in her situation. Narrating a birthday party that she worked at as a teen, she writes “while the eyes of these perfectly formed children swiftly and deftly bored into the deepest part of me, the glances from their parents provided me with an exotic sense of power as I watched them inexpertly pretend not to notice me.” Later, when she starts reading Russian novels, she further embraces her outsider status, looking down on her classmates with a “perfectly calibrated air of disinterest.”
Similarly, Sarah Manguso, in her 2008 memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, experiences a sense of superiority because of her long bout with the autoimmune disease, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. “When a friend or stranger mentioned anything about a difficult or noteworthy event,” she writes, “I chose one of the countless hospital visits from recent memory and told the little story in a way that prevented further conversation about it or any other subject.”
Scalise isn’t quite so brutal with himself, but he does come to realize the limits of the narrative impulse. As the disease goes on and he accustoms himself to living with it, it no longer seems so necessary to tell everyone about it. When, at a party many years after his diagnosis, a guest tells him about his sick cousin, Scalise begins to tell his own story and, ignoring his own prescriptions about the catastrophe anecdote, he tells it flatly, almost perfunctorily. Reflecting on his own lingering need to narrate, he writes “in my mind I was shoving forward the parts of my pituitary tumor’s tale that made me special…I wanted to replace whatever meaning I feared people projected onto me when they saw my face, my eyes, my hands.” After years of defining himself solely by his illness, however, the appeal wears off and he begins adjusting to his new life as a person who just happens to be ill.
If defining ourselves by our disease is one of the principal traps for the reflective sufferer, then a different narrative snare awaits the illness memoirist: tracing a too-neat trajectory that leads the narrator from sickness to health and a triumphant ending. One of the reasons why contemporary illness memoirs, with Scalise’s as a prominent example, take on a meta aspect, is because, at this late date, everyone is hyperaware of the dangers of an easy arc that gives false reassurance to the reader. Grealy touches on this need when she realizes that the simple narrative of her finding her true face after many surgeries is misleading, and she finds freedom in that revelation. But it is Manguso who most complicates this need for easy coherence.
Manguso is careful to insist upon her story’s adherence to convention. At the end of the book, she declares, “This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well” before noting that “most people consider their suffering a widely applicable model, and I am not an exception.” But it is impossible to take her at her word. While the bare facts of her story do lead from sickness to a tentative health, Manguso is intimately concerned with the ways in which we disarrange our own narratives.
“How long was I sick?” she wonders late in the book. She responds by noting that her first symptoms appeared on March 26, 1995, but that, before that, she had had a head cold for weeks which had probably triggered her disease. She had refused to give in to that head cold, allowing it to linger, held slightly at bay, because her choir was giving a performance and she was supposed to be signing a Gregorio Allegri setting from 1630. “But that story,” she writes, “began in the seventeenth century, before Mozart was even born. So when did I first get sick?” As Manguso realizes, no narrative is self-contained because everything is related to everything else. Although she is forced to provide a shape to her story, she chooses a fragmented one, built on a series of a short chapters that are often little more than short anecdote.
Scalise gives his story a more traditional form, but he understands just as much as Manguso the importance of complicating his own narrative. “In the early days,” he writes late in the book, “I endured a disaster, then moved on to tell the tale of it. I made it mine, or at least appeared to. Now I was unmoored and tentative, divorced from that time, part of me glad and bidding it good riddance, but another, louder part of me wishing…that I could return to my lovely tenure under its full influence.” Here as elsewhere, Scalise suggests that the real illness narrative is not about overcoming the initial onslaught of the sickness, but about how to live on in its aftermath, having to define yourself as existing, at long last, apart from the mere fact of your disease.